General Resources
Teaching Apps
- Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational exercises and games via smartphones, laptops, and tablets.
- Padlet is a virtual wall that allows people to express their thoughts on a common topic easily. It works like an online sheet of paper.
- Explain Everything is an app that allows teachers and students to create presentations or record screencasts to demonstrate a concept or illustrate a tutorial.Combining inking, images, text, and voice, Explain Everything offers a one-stop shop for student created work.
- Educreations is a community where anyone can teach what they know and learn what they don’t. It is a unique interactive whiteboard and screencasting tool that’s simple, powerful, and fun to use.
- Piktochart is a free web-based infographic creator that can be used to enhance visual presentations in the classroom or create visually interesting assignment sheets or syllabi. It can also be a way for you or your students to visually represent how ideas relate.
- VoiceThread is a web-based annotation tool that allows students and teachers to offer audio and video comments, including responses to student papers. Using VoiceThread, you can create a conversational timeline which can be played back to jump start class discussions. Now fully integrated with Sakai; sign up to access premium features.
- Poll Everywhere allows real time voting via web browser or cell phone—it doesn’t have to be a smart phone! The web-based application can build polls in seconds and is particularly useful in large lecture courses to conduct informal quizzes or gauge comfort with concepts. One beta feature allows Poll Everywhere to insert polls directly into PowerPoint presentations.
- Annotation Studio creates a platform from which you and your students can read and annotate texts. This free and easy-to-use system is designed to facilitate group discussion about assigned class texts or uploaded student papers.
- Prezi is a cloud-based tool to visually relate information and can be a replacement for Power Point presentations. Students and educators get a free upgrade to a premium. Web-based Prezi makes real-time collaboration easy, and students can “present” remotely or use voiceover.
- Vocaroo is an extremely simple, yet powerful, web-based tool for audio recording directly from your browser–no need for extra software. If your computer has a microphone, Vocaroo can capture and save a recording to be downloaded or shared. In “flipped” classrooms, it can be used to record lectures. With Vocaroo, instructors can respond orally to student work and students can submit audio assignments.
- Google Docs is a powerful tool for use in education, especially now that “Scarlet Docs” (with 30 GB of storage) is available to all students and faculty at Rutgers. Because the service is available from any computer or mobile device, course notes and presentations can be worked on from any location without the need for a flash drive. Beyond its value as a planning tool, the Docs service facilitates collaboration through sharing of editable documents.
- Camtasia Studio is a freeware editing suite useful for creating video tutorials for instruction both in and out of the classroom. Record your screen while performing a task and give your students a visual representation of the task at hand, whether you’re teaching the writing process or best practices in disciplinary research.
- Evernote is a note-taking application with multiple uses in and out of the classroom. Available in a web interface or as an app for iOS or Android, Evernote lets you edit a lesson plan on a computer and teach from that plan from a tablet in the classroom. It also helps you organize notes in various ways through subject tags.
